You wake up it is 6:00 AM. You walk out to watch the morning news, then the question; what news station should I watch? On one hand you have CNN, MSNBC, and ABC news who are more of a left leaning news source and on the the other hand Fox News and Fox Business. Now, knowing the rest of you I can only assume that 75% of you would watch such sources as CNN, MSNBC, and ABC while the other 15% would watch Fox and Fox business. That is your decision to make at your own home, but what about once you get to school? We know that our school is dominated by Liberal teachers and students, how does that affect our lesson plans and our opinions of the world? Why did our school give us a “media bias chart” which when you look further is more biased than we were told it was. We are pretty much being force fed the UN Sustainable Development Goals every week. The lesson plan is already made up so we can’t change that but what we CAN change is how we view our news and credibility of those sources.
It all starts at home, you choose what you watch because you either A) agree with the message that “news” station is getting across or B) you are watching for straight facts and don’t care about what the on air personalities think and you make up your mind on the situation while watching it and gathering facts. Which one seems easier… A, as Americans we are usually given the stereotype of ‘fat, McDonalds eating, gun cleaning, Wall lovin” Americans but we aren’t. However option A turns us into these types of closed minded people who won’t listen to each other opinions that those stereotypes implies. If you watch a news station and listen to what they are saying and immediately agree with what is being said it does make you lazy. So how do you combat this feeling of laziness and possibly absorbing wrong information simple: do the research yourself. Although it may seem like extra work for something you can get from some guy with a spray tan on a mainstream media chanel you can look up something from a couple local news stations and alternate but trusty websites. We were told earlier this year about something that would help us find “unbiased” news sources but how trustworthy was that chart really?
In the weeks leading up to our winter break, we spent 2 hours a week analyzing and learning about “media bias” and “fake news”. We were shown a website titled “THE MEDIA BIAS CHART” with some of the most popular news sources. The chart was a grid with the categories Neutral, Skews (left, right), Hyper Partisan (left, right), and most extreme (left, right). At a first glance it looks like what you would expect: Fox News on the RIght and CNN on the left, that wasn’t the first thing I noticed however. If you look closer you can see that CNN is labeled on the border of Skews Left and Neutral. However Fox News is listed as Hyper partisan right. To make matters worse, Fox News is in a box that says it is Extreme unfair interpretations Of the news. But CNN is under fair interpretations of the news. A couple nights ago, I was watching CNN when the President was described as a “Russian Asset”. This is false reporting, however Fox News is not much better, they referred to members of the more left mainstream news as “Liberal Media Watchdogs”.
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